Live data from Hacker News

I Inspected My Take-Home Interview Project. It Was a Whole Operation

citizendot.github.io

51–60 of 135 posts

Re: I Inspected My Take-Home Interview Project. It Was a Whole Operation

#51
post #28

> Side note: Why use a raw IP address? If anything, this screams “malware.” At least register a decoy domain like lint-checker.com or jenkins-ci-runner.net. If the threat actors who wrote this are reading: take notes people! Maybe they don't want to give any identifying info to the domain registrar? Or just minimizing their online presence?

Or possibly these hosts fell victims of their malware, too, and see now used as proxies.

Re: I Inspected My Take-Home Interview Project. It Was a Whole Operation

#54
post #42

I assume an standard way to do this is through a VM provided by the recruiter, right?

I don't think you should trust the recruiter's VM any more than their code. Spin up instead your own disposable VM or container with no creds or host mounts.

Clearly, judging by recent openai news, sandboxes are not unbreakable, but at least there's nothing worth stealing and you throw it away afterward.

Re: I Inspected My Take-Home Interview Project. It Was a Whole Operation

#56
Wow, after reading this article, I figured out I was hacked, but with a way more sophisticated attack.

A few weeks ago, I had an interview with a CTO of a totally legit company. It was weird because he had disabled the camera, and the person had a strong accent. But everything else sounded like a normal screening interview, and the person definitely knew what he was talking about. At the end of the interview, he explained to me that during the technical interview I would need to make some modifications to their project (it's an OSS product), so he asked me to clone the repo and check the setup.

Later, the HR person said the CTO got sick, so the interview would be postponed. But a few days later, the HR profile was deleted from LinkedIn. It was super weird, but it didn't trigger my suspicion until I saw this post on HackNews. I checked, and the repo I was cloning and running during the interview had a malware payload.

P.S. I think it was a targeted attack because in the past I maintained a very popular NPM package with 43+M weekly downloads. That's my only explanation for why someone would carry out such a sophisticated social-engineering attack against me.

P.P.S. It's great that I have 2FA everywhere, and I always publish NPM packages manually without using tokens. But I need to wipe my laptop and reinstall everything.

Re: I Inspected My Take-Home Interview Project. It Was a Whole Operation

#58

That was a fun read, I wonder if vscode would still load the script if you click “don’t trust author”? That being said, can you embed something yourself and push the commit?

> I wonder if vscode would still load the script if you click “don’t trust author”

It doesn't. VSCode dev replied here on it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46719712.

But, I don't think anybody pays attention to the workspace trust. When ".vscode" has launch commands, it should rather say, "Trusting this workspace runs the following command on your behalf" or something similar.

Re: I Inspected My Take-Home Interview Project. It Was a Whole Operation

#59
post #42

I assume an standard way to do this is through a VM provided by the recruiter, right?

I don't think you should trust the recruiter's VM any more than their code. Spin up instead your own disposable VM or container with no creds or host mounts. Clearly, judging by recent openai news, sandboxes are not unbreakable, but at least there's nothing worth stealing and you throw it away afterward.

I assume a VM that is running in the cloud will be enough. Not thinking about a local one.

Re: I Inspected My Take-Home Interview Project. It Was a Whole Operation

#60
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sorry, i added it to set the mood for my site :') yk, like moving lamps at the top, hanging dementor at the right side (only visible on desktops). should i remove it?

I used developer tools to delete the dementor, then I muted the site when it started playing music.

might as well "curl https://citizendot.github.io/articles/fake-job-interview-git..." and read the output :')
Post reply on HN